With the recent release of a new kit and the club’s 10-year celebration at Hughes Stadium on the horizon, we spoke with Republic FC’s Vice President of Marketing and kit designer Ben Mayberry about his time with the club and the creative process behind creating the Indomitable Club’s on-field attire.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: How did you get your your start as Republic FC’s kit designer?
A: I started as a designer in the college athletic space. I was at the San Francisco 49ers as a graphic designer for a while[and] became creative director there, moved on, [and] was kind of out on my own for a while consulting and designing for different teams. Then I got a fulltime creative director position at the Oakland A’s and COVID happened. I had a couple other design gigs and then the Republic job opened up and it was a perfect fit.
Q: Speaking of the kit designing process, how does that kind of come about?
A: This particular kit was kind of a unique process that we knew we wanted to something special for the huge game coming up — this 10-year anniversary celebration. It was really fun to dig into the archives and go through the history of the kits that the team has worn throughout the years. So, that theme was pretty obvious and easy to get behind. We’re working on the process for next season, and the future, which is a little bit more of high-level thinking, ‘What do we want to say as an organization over the next five years? How do we want to present ourselves and express our brand? How’s our brand going to stay traditional? And what are ways that we’re going to evolve?’ [It’s] really asking those big questions, and that’s on a macro scale of what we’re going to do for the future.
But, when it gets into diving deep and digging into a particular kit, [we] come up with themes and ideas, run them by different stakeholders within the organization, and garner as much consensus as we can as far as objectives + what we’re trying to achieve. We start pretty broad and narrow it down, and then start to get really fine in the details.
It’ll be about a three to four month process until we’ve gotten the consensus and everybody’s on the same page as far as what we’re going to do. After we select the execution and conceptual design, it needs to be redesigned to get into manufacturing and production. Then, there’s a lot of sampling and testing back and forth with the manufacturer. Once we’re okay, your job is to now make and ship them. Up until that point is probably about four months.
Q: How do you balance staying current with fashion trends while also creating a look that is going to outlast these trends and stay iconic throughout the years?
A: We’re going through those types of conversations now. What is the traditional part of the brand, what [are] the areas of the brand that we can explore and be a little bit more expressive. It’s trying to strike that balance, having something for everybody, and there’s opportunities. This year was a little bit different, because we know we wanted to make a make a splash with our third kit, but a more traditional splash. So, our home kit this year is traditionally more of what a third kit would be. But with the 10-year, we wanted the Old Glory red to be the hero of the campaign, and we really wanted to keep that as something special that we introduced for this game particularly.
Q: The Old Glory kit is really themed around this Old Glory red that’s pulled right from the colors of the state flag. What do you think it is about specifically Old Glory red that really captures the club?
A: I think it’s something unique within the market, and I think it has such deep roots with the state being in the California flag. That’s such a deep part of what Sacramento means and what it means to be from Sacramento. It’s a really great intersection between something to rally behind, but yet something familiar. I think that’s a reason why this color is so strong and resonated so well.
Q: One of the things that I love about the kits is they all have these small Easter eggs peppered throughout all of them. Has there been a time where, you get an idea and you’re like, ‘Oh, I wish I would have thought of this a few months ago’?
A: Always. That’s the nature of designing, especially kits and uniforms and that sort of thing. You’re doing this outside of your normal process for the upcoming season or the season that you’re designing for. Soccer is a little better because the lead times are a lot shorter. [When] working in other sports, lead times are years, so you’re working years in advance before you start to actually figure out what your season-long campaign is going to be and you work backwards from there. We have to work ahead all the time, [and] as the campaign develops more, becomes more sophisticated, and we sort of dial it in, there’s always those ‘Ah man, I wish we could have got that in there,’ or ‘That would have made the kit just a little bit more.’ So, there’s always that.
Q: How do you approach creating a design that is not only going to resonate with fans in the crowd, but also excite the players who are going to be wearing the kits?
A: That’s the toughest part of doing this. You’re not going to please everybody. I think that’s one of the things that I realized really early on. And the fans are not always going to get the full story about why this was designed this way and the decision-making process to get to where you get to. There’s a lot of opinions out there when teams do re-brands, but we have business objectives that we’re trying to accomplish at the same time. So, it’s kind of that mesh of all of these inputs coming together and affecting what the final product is going to look like.
There’s input from all across the organization — different departments, stakeholders, the team and coaching staff, ownership — there’s a lot of opinions. Usually what you see is a consensus of the organization, with one of the biggest components to that [being] what we think fan sentiment is going to be around it. Ultimately, we want the fans to be proud to to wear our kits and be excited to get a new kit every season and want to join the team on the field. That’s one of the cooler parts about how we update kits in soccer, is we want to tell a story and bring the fans along with it. Hopefully the fans have enough excitement around it that they want to join us, and so far I think we’ve done a really good job of taking all of those things into consideration. But if the goal is set out to please everybody, you’re set up to fail.
